There’s nothing worse than waking up on Christmas morning, opening a shiny new toy but finding that you’re unable to play with it because your parents forgot to buy batteries for it?

Customers, supplier and managers are no different – they hate surprises. Customers want to know what they’ve purchased, when they’re going to get it, and how they’re going to use it. Any unexpected need for additional items leads to lower satisfaction.

Managers, Executives and Shareholders want to know the business forecast so that they can make the right investments in resources and deals. Deviating too far from the projections will cause heads to roll!

Suppliers and business partners also want predictability. This enables them to do their work or produce their goods on time and on budget; rush jobs, delays and rework all add unnecessary cost.

Preventing surprises means being able to do the same or similar activities in a repeatable manner such that the outcome is predictable. It doesn’t have to always be the same – stuff happens – just predictable. This predictability also has to be retained as the company grows, markets change or personnel rotate; It has to be sustainable.

Predictability, repeatability and sustainability all come from having a common approach or method to work performed, and supplying rapid access to the same information about the customer, product or market. The difference between having these capabilities and using these things is accountability.

A balance must also be struck between drivng consistent and repeatable work behaviors, and tolerating enough flexibility to allow the innovation that drives continual improvement. This requires a focus on what is produced rather than how it gets produced. Unfortunately all too often managers focus on the tasks and activities rather than the results.

My final point is to note that, just as batteries eventually run out and die, so do process improvement initiatives. New batteries must be installed – or at least recharged – at regular intervals in order to keep the machine operating well – unless it has a Permanent Means of Operating (PMO). Funny how that acronym keeps coming up in the context of sustainable results.

While I normally like to come up with my own observations on the parallels between service delivery and otherwise irrelevant or random activities, I thought the post by Chris Taylor at www.bpmforreal.com titled “Business Process without blisters” was a valuable reference from here. As a former mountain climber and hiker myself, it echoes my own thinking well.

I particularly liked Chris’ metaphors about the need for shared responsibility & ownership, having informed and invested workers, and creating technology-enabled environments. You can find it here. Enjoy!

Spring is just around the corner here in the Carolinas, and like many Englishmen abroad, I take great pride in my “garden”. Gardening to me, of course, is not tending to a vegetable plot, but what is more commonly referred to as “yard work” here in the US (I’m bi-lingual these days). I also find great satisfaction in planning out what plants to use, where and when to plant them, and how to maintain them so that they remain healthy. Not so dissimilar to running an organization, really:

Hiring

Picking the right flowers, shrubs or trees requires insight in to not only which ones look good, but which ones like the shade vs direct sunlight; which ones like dry sandy soil vs heavy clay; which ones are resistant to deer and rabbits who can eat all your hard work before breakfast. Every yard that I know has a combination of all these conditions. An otherwise good shrub or tree planted in the wrong place will die.

You also need to understand which plants will look good next to the others: It’s no good having a yard full of “show” pieces – they end up competing for your eye. Good landscape architecture requires the selection of a few strategically placed high-visibility items surrounded by less showy other plants that provide a foundation to frame the show pieces. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, having teams of all quarterbacks or all point guards will not win many games!

Anyone who has hired should see the parallels here: Selecting the right worker requires more than looking at just their job-specific qualifications. It requires consideration of how they would fit into the company culture and their ability to work with other staff. The same candidate may make a great SW development PM, but be abysmal in customer engagement situations. Someone with a history of work in a highly structured buttoned-down corporation may not do well in a shorts-and-Tevas startup.

Supervision

Most plants look great when they’re first put in. They often have flowers and bright shiny leaves from their coddling at the nursery. Even after a year or so they should still look good as they mature. But there comes a time when they start over-growing the plants next to them, or getting so tall they obscure the view out of a window.

That’s when it’s time to prune the shrubs. All too often, however, the pruning is left too long and the large amount of plant to be cut off ends up leaving an ugly bare hole in the landscape for a season or two. It is far better to “nip” small amounts off at regular intervals before they get too big. One of the biggest compliments a gardener can receive is that it doesn’t look like their garden ever needs pruning. The secret is that it gets pruned regularly so that there are always other leaves or flowers left showing.

It is no different dealing with personnel issues, where bad behaviors or poor performance should be addressed quickly with small remedial actions rather than waiting for it to blow up and require something more drastic. This also applies at the group level, where teams need to be assessed and re-shaped regular intervals and not allowed to grow to the point where mass layoffs are required.

Training and Development

Very few plants can just be put in the ground and left to their own devices to grow. They need additional assistance, particularly to get them through their first full cycle of seasons. Water is required as a minimum. Adding fertilizer will accelerate growth, and disease or insect sprays will protect that growth.

Providing the time and resources for relevant and forward-looking training provides the fertilizer for organizations. Providing good pay and benefits helps protect it against loss.

At the same time, new plants should always be picked smaller than the required size and allowed to grow into place. It may take more time to get the desired effect, but the result will be worth it, especially if the new plant is surrounded by older established plants that can “carry the eye” until the new ones are ready. Think of it as succession planning for gardens!

Strategy vs Execution

Personally, I like shrubs. You can get them in all shapes, sizes, colors and textures. When established they take very little effort to maintain and look good year after year. This is unlike flowers – particularly those that die off each year and need to be dug out and replaced. This is too much effort for me! I want to be able to balance the time required to take care of the existing plants with the time to plan out what else I can do to enhance it.

Business leaders require a similar balance of Execution and Strategy. This is not easy to do, as leaders all too easily become so drained or distracted by the here-and-now that they neglect planning for the future.

Weather forecasts are notoriously wrong: 2 feet of show when they just called for a “dusting”, near drought conditions when they predicted high hurricane activity. Even record low temperatures despite knowledge of global “warming”.

The forecasters have become better in recent years, progressing from the basic Farmers’ Almanac to modern super-computer models. They have made particular progress with short-term forecasts based on radar and satellite data where the more variables and interactions they can model, the more data points they can capture, and the quicker they can recalculate and update the data, then the more dependable the forecast becomes.

Project plans are much the same. Even the best ones cannot hope to capture all the possible variables and future actions that could impact the plan, and the further out in time the plans go, the greater the chance for error. However that’s no excuse to start with a blank sheet of paper, or fit the entire 18-month plan on to a bar napkin, either. Good project planning eventually comes down to good knowledge management: To be able to create a complete plan without having to re-discover all the best practices and mistakes of the past.

Best practices should be universal, and mistakes should be unique

This requires maintaining and updating some form of template project plan that includes the cumulative learning from all earlier projects. Include all the facts that are known; when the answers aren’t known, include a checklist of questions to ask to determine the facts; and state all assumptions as facts that can then be verified or corrected. The more you can include, the less chance for misunderstanding or error.

But still be ready to discover new things that have not happened before and that nobody expected.

A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan next week – George S. Patton

There is, however, a trade-off to be made between spending large amounts of time capturing every activity in great detail and assessing as many possible risks and outcomes as possible, and getting the plan underway. Avoid trying to create a “prefect” plan. The law of diminishing returns rules those plans. Instead, recognize that your plan is going to be wrong in some way, and be ready to change the plan as you go along to accommodate those imperfections. Just remember to “pay it forward” and record those adaptations either as best practices or mistakes to be avoided.

If you can do all that, I predict you will have a bright future. Maybe.

Everyone has their favorite GPS or “SatNav” story. It used to be a weekly occurrence, for example, to hear of large intercontinental trucks getting stuck down narrow country lanes in the south of England as European drivers used their SatNav systems to try to get to remote farms and businesses for the first time. This is the first Management of Change lesson for any IT department:

New technology used “blindly” out of the box without any practical guidance or best practices can often end up costing more than the old method.

In another example closer to home, I increasingly find myself at a loss when setting up informal meetings with potential vendors at local coffee shops or deli’s: Where I would normally assist with directions by providing instructions like “turn left and go for about half a mile. It’s on the right with the green and white awning”, I now end up having to supply the exact street name and number for the visitor to plug into their GPS device. More often than not, I don’t know those specifics and have to look them up or call. This brings up lesson #2:

New technology may make your life easier, but it may also incur additional effort or inconvenience for others.

The solution in both cases is to ensure that you consider the complete end-end business processes of not only the target organization, but also their internal and external partners, suppliers and customers. What is good for one organization may not be good for the broader relationship.

At the same time, organizations can also get so focused on the tool or technology itself that they forget about the need to also change the way in which the organization operates to take advantage of them. This brings me to lesson #3:

New technology used in old ways will rarely yield significant operational improvement.

This goes beyond providing training on the new technology. It requires a complete understanding of all contributions to the process and each organization’s business requirements. These requirements are often poorly defined or contradictory, and it becomes IT’s job to join the dots and fill in the gaps to create a consistent and holistic process that the new technology can support. In some cases, this may also require overcoming the internal politics of change with senior management.

New Technology release is relatively easy. Effective adoption is not. However, if the business process is allowed to lead the technology, and historical barriers from organization charts and governance models are removed, you will be able to map out the big improvements you’re looking for and reach the right destination.

I recently had lunch with relatives, including my young nephew. He ordered a “plain cheeseburger, please”. In doing so he thought he had asked for a cheeseburger without the usual fixings of lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo, ketchup or mustard. Just a plain cheeseburger.

He was confused, then, when his order arrived. It had no lettuce, tomato, etc just as be had ordered. But it also had no cheese on it! When we questioned the waitress she quite straightforwardly said “oh, I’m sorry, I thought you wanted nothing on your burger”.

Both my nephew and the waitress had made different assumptions about what “plain” meant.

This is what Donald Rumsfeld would call dealing with the “unknown knowns” in the lunch contract; Items each party thought they knew, but had never confirmed. This failure to properly articulate all the facts about the order, and unwittingly leave some requirements unspoken or implied, is an amazingly frequent occurrence. Requirements, after all, form the foundation of any project and must be actively managed too.

In a separate incident, a cousin of my wife was renovating the master bathroom in his house. He found a reputable plumber to come in to move the toilet and install a new shower. Unfortunately he failed to specify that the shower should stay at the same temperature when the toilet was flushed. He assumed that was standard practice. As his partner’s screams of pain will attest, this was apparently not so in their area!

The most successful projects also occur when you know the most about the products, technology and environment in which the project is being conducted. This can be thought of as maximizing the known knowns (ie things you know that you know, aka The Facts). The more you know, the better your plans can be.

In order to do this, you also need to minimize those things you don’t know (you can never eliminate them, the world is too complex). Assumptions (the unknown knowns I described earlier) need to be brought out and explicitly stated as facts (“I want cheese on my cheesburger!” or even better: “I want cheddar cheese on my cheeseburger!”) or listed as questions (ie things that you know that you don’t know – the known unknowns). Either way, they need to be uncovered and addressed.

It can be just as important to state what you’re NOT going to do, as what you are. This keeps expectations of project deliverables in line as well as avoiding Scope Creep during project execution.

Reusable templates and checklists are great ways to make sure that as many assumptions get confirmed and questions answered about a project as possible. Many PM tools also contain the ability to start or “seed” a new project plan from well maintained “gold standard” plans developed from the cumulative experience of other similar projects (see my previous post on “Project Vaccination”).

Unanswered questions and assumptions become the focus of the project Risk Plan, where strategies and tactics are developed and budgeted to address the impact according to the different possible answers. They should never be put off until later, as nobody likes to wait for another burger to be cooked. It just slows down how quickly everyone gets to the dessert.

I’ll discuss the fourth category of knowledge – and Rummy’s most quoted – the Unknown Unknowns in a later post. Right now I’m ready for my Waldorf salad: Hold the apples, celery and walnuts, and put the dressing on the side!

Delivery of projects as a service requires more than a solid PM methodology. It requires a complete environment that ensures accountability, supports continuous reuse and learning across the portfolio, and is tightly integrated with the other enterprise business processes.